Printable Spacecraft: Flexible Electronic Platforms for NASA Missions

Imagine editing a design file on your laptop, uploading it to a specialty printer and collecting your spacecraft in the output tray later in the day. Flexible printed electronics have revolutionized consumer products such as cellular phones and PDAs, allowing greater functionality with decreasing size and weight. Perhaps the same can be done for NASA spacecraft. This study will explore the concept of designing and fabricating a spacecraft based entirely on flexible substrate printed electronics. The study will consider mission requirements, manufacturing compatibility and advanced technology from both industry and academia.

This innovative architecture offers the potential of tremendous benefits such as shortened design and development schedules, significantly reduced cost, mass and volume and true mass production. These benefits and the novel design approach can be translated directly into mission level advantages such as increased density for network missions, surface systems that land themselves, and multifunctional integrated surfaces. With this revolutionary capability, NASA would be able to dramatically improve performance, flexibility, weight, cost, schedule, reliability and operational simplicity for many scientific missions and support for human exploration.

This is early/mid-stage (TRL 3) — the most realistic path in is NASA SBIR/STTR, which funds small businesses and research institutions to develop technology aligned with NASA's needs (equity-free, phased funding). Check whether a current SBIR/STTR solicitation topic overlaps with this project's technology area, or contact the project directly (above) to ask.

None of these are guaranteed paths for this specific project — TechPort itself doesn't have an "apply" button. Reaching out to the contact(s) above with a specific question is usually the fastest way to find out what's actually open.